Biotechnology News – Latest Headlines

Even after being frozen for 18 years, human embryos can be thawed, grown in the laboratory, and successfully induced to produce human embryonic stem cells, which represent a valuable resource for drug screening and medical research.

An international team of researchers led by computer scientist Pavel Pevzner, from the University of California, San Diego, have developed a new algorithm to sequence organisms' genomes from a single cell faster and more accurately.

Bioengineers at the University of California, San Diego have developed a method of modeling, simultaneously, an organism's metabolism and its underlying gene expression. In the emerging field of systems biology, scientists model cellular behavior in order to understand how processes such as metabolism and gene expression relate to one another and bring about certain characteristics in the larger organism.

Georgia Tech researchers are focusing on ways to fight cancer by attacking defective genes before they are able to make proteins. John McDonald is studying micro RNAs (miRNAs), a class of small RNAs that interact with messenger RNAs (mRNAs) that have been linked to a number of diseases, including cancer. McDonald's lab placed two different miRNAs (MiR-7 and MiR-128) into ovarian cancer cells and watched how they affected the gene system.

Manuals for designing a synthetic promoter using the DNA CAD environment for Challenge A, as well as pointers for designing DNA sequences to introduce plant functions for Challenge B are now available from the GenoCon website.

A team of researchers from the University of Copenhagen have developed a method to hinder unwanted toxins from entering the edible parts of plants such as the oilseed rape, which will make it suitable for animal feed.

The microbial community or microbiome that inhabits the rhizosphere and endosphere - the niches immediately surrounding and inside a plant's root?facilitates the shuttling of nutrients and information into and out of the roots within the soil matrix. These underground microbial activities have not received as much attention as the effort to characterize the role of the microbial populations inside and on the surfaces of humans, but this is now changing owing to a recent publication.

It's relatively easy to collect massive amounts of data on microbes. But the files are so large that it takes days to simply transmit them to other researchers and months to analyze once they are received. Researchers at Michigan State University have developed a new computational technique that relieves the logjam that these 'big data' issues create.

Beneath the surface of the earth, an influential community of microbes mingles with plant roots. In the first large-scale analysis of those communities, scientists have now catalogued and compared the hundreds of types of bacteria that associate with the roots of the model plant Arabidopsis under various conditions.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded a three-year $999,531 grant to Virginia Tech to optimize the laboratory processes used to make custom DNA molecules with the tools and methods of industrial engineering.

Dodder vines are parasitic plants that suck water, nutrients and information from other plants as they spread over them. Plant biologists at the University of California, Davis, have now shown that they can make plants resistant to dodder by attacking the junctions where the parasite taps into the host.